Workshop on Success: A Brief Report

On 18th September at Senate House in London we met some of our collaborators for our proposed research project. It was a great day in which we explored ideas and experiences.

What is success?
We started discussing the meaning of the word "success" (etymologically linked to the Latin word for succession, and thus a term with a strong temporal and causal component) and how the residency would serve as to critically analyse everyday conceptions of success as tied to individual achievement, fame, power and competition. Success demands not just competition but cooperation, and changes our perception of ourselves and the way other perceive us. Any meaningful examination of success requires also a reflection on failure. Our own interest in success comes from its relationship with health: how does doing well relate to being well?

Polarities
Apart from success and failure, we are interested in character and context, practices and structures, individuals and communities/organisations, internal and external, public and private. How do we achieve success, and what does it do to us once we have it? Several themes emerged from the discussion, including snatching success from the jaws of defeat; experiencing failure after being a success; failing in one domain while succeeding in another; performance anxiety and corporate psychopathy; and failure as necessary, as a useful and important aspect of growth, creativity and innovation.

Some Thoughts on Time and Success in Elite Sport

I am writing this blog from the new Wellcome Trust Reading Room, which is truly an inspirational place. Just to give you an example, take a look at this fantastic dress called 'The closure of the neural tube'.

'Closure of the neural tube' dress,
at WT Reading Room

(The neural tube is the embryonic precursor of the nervous system, and the closure of the neural tube is a fundamental process in embryonic development in vertebrates. Defects in this process lead to malformations such as spina bifida). I found it simply brilliant, and it reminds me of the times when I was working in a development biology laboratory at IFOM (Milan, Italy) during my lab rotation for my PhD.

I am a biotechnologist by background, and I still find anything related to biology/biotechnology fascinating, even if about ten years ago I have decided not to work at the bench and pursue instead the study of the ethical and social implications of biotechnology. I am now a Lecturer in Bioethics & Society at King's College London, and I have been working at the Strand Campus for the last five years.

My interest in investigating the concept of success comes from my explorations of direct to consumer (DTC) genetic tests to scout out children's athletic potential. What do DTC-tests have to do with success, you might think? Well, to start with DTC-genetic tests are sold to parents and coaches with the claim that they are able to identify early on an athletic potential in children of three, four or five years old. In the US, summer camps for talent scouting are not a recent invention, but the incorporation of genetic tests is. Leaving aside for the moment the question of the soundness of the science (how justified is the inference that a certain genetic polymorphism can form the basis for a 'successful' future sprinter, or long-distance runner?), what I have been interested in exploring are the decisions that parents and coaches make on the basis of these tests. These decisions shape the future of their children (see vignette from the New Yorker).

Parents shaping the lives of their children.

The assumption is that in the context of sport, an early specialisation and professionalisation is a necessary condition for the development of a future successful elite athlete. On the basis of this assumption, and in hindsight on the basis of the success of the individual, many decisions made by parents to pursue an aggressive education are justified.

In a paper published in 2013 on Sport Ethics & Philosophy I investigated whether such assumption is justified. I have only tangentially explored the concept of success in elite sport, but the more I have been looking into the narrative of success of professional athletes [and this relates to Zoë's project on stories of success], the more I have started to realise that success in elite sport (but also in other contexts where we think that an early specialisation is necessary, think of music!) comes about only at the expense of trade-offs, (and often very big ones!) with other things that we value in life.